Standardising English Spelling: The Role of Printing in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Graphemic Developments

Description

The standardisation of English spelling that resulted from the advent of printing is one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of English. This pioneering book explores new avenues of investigation into spelling development by looking at the Early Modern English period, when irregular features across graphemes became standardised. It traces the development of the English spelling system through a number of 'competing' standards, raising questions about the meaning of 'standardisation'. It introduces a new model for the analysis of large-scale graphemic developments from a diachronic perspective, and provides a new empirical method geared specifically to the study of spelling standardisation between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The method is applied to four interconnected case studies, focusing on the standardisation of positional spellings, i and y, etymological spelling and vowel diacritic spelling. This book is essential reading for researchers of writing systems and the history of English.

Marco Condorelli completed his Ph.D. in English Language at the University of Central Lancashire. His previous publications include Advances in Historical Orthography, c. 1500-1800 (editor, Cambridge 2020), and a number of articles which have appeared in, for example, English Language and Linguistics, English Studies and The Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics.